Significant change might require those who are now high in the hierarchy to move downward many steps. This seems to them undesirable and is resisted.

Those at too great a distance may, I am well are, mistake ignorance for perspective.

And reading itself is an amazing activity: You glance at a thin, flat object made from a tree...and the voice of the author begins to speak inside your head. (Hello!)

the future belongs to those societies that treat new ideas as delicate, fragile and immensely valuable pathways to the future.

Natural selection has served as a kind of intellectual sieve, producing brains and intelligences increasingly competent to deal with the laws of nature.

Our difficulties in understanding or effectuatingcommunication with other animals may arise from our reluctance to grasp unfamiliar ways of dealing with the world.

Do dogs feel for humans something akin to religious ecstasy? What other strong or subtle emotions are felt by animals that do not communicate with us?

Evolution is adventitious and not foresighted. Only through the deaths of an immense number of slightly maladapted organisms are we, brains and all, here today.

Lashley also reported no apparent change in the general behavior of a rat when significant fractions—say 10 percent—of its brain were removed. But no one asked the rat of its opinion.

Once intelligent beings achieve technology and the capacity for self-destruction of their species, the selective advantage of intelligence becomes more uncertain.

The price we pay for the anticipation of our future is anxiety about it.

Children, like God, see only our actions.

The need for beauty and the [artistic] creation which embodies it is inseparable from man, and without it man would possibly not want to live in the world.

A sight to touch e’en hatred’s self with pity.

Always remember that if editors were so damned smart, they would know how to dress.

Money was their God; work their religion.

I never leave my house. Then I don't have to put a bra on, and I don't have to change my pants.

I am interested in what happens to people who find the whole of life so rewarding that they are able to move through it with the same kind of delight in which a child moves through a game.

Routine is really important. However late you went to bed the night before, or however much you had to drink, get up at the same time each day and get on with it.

Only in Washington would death be considered a taxable event. [a cynical but perhaps fair assessment]

Those who purchase meat, fur, and leather have no right to be shielded from the sights and sounds of the slaughterhouses from which these products were produced.